I have a very religious background but currently I’m not sure whether you would consider me religious. (Also to be clear I watched most of the video but I don’t know much about him otherwise)
I think when hearing people share about personal things in the category of religion, it’s important to try to be careful when pattern matching or when making assumptions about what beliefs people hold. People can use very similar words to refer to vastly different metaphysical beliefs. Two people could also have very similar metaphysical priors, and one might use more religious coded language due to their cultural background, whereas the other might not.
When he says that prayer works, I don’t think you should necessarily take him to mean that he is communicating with an omni*** being who is making changes to our reality based on that communication.
For all intents and purposes he would probably concede to reducing prayer to a form of psychologically theraputic meditation. However, I think part of adopting a religious attitude is a hesitancy towards being reductive in that way.
Anyway, it got me thinking, when someone says they “believe in God” does this mean something like “I assign a ≥ 50% probability to there being an omnipotent omnipresent and omniscient intelligence?”
This is a good question, but how someone responds will vary a lot person to person, and it will be very difficult to converge on a common enough understanding of the meaning of words sufficient to get a clear answer.
For many people, it’s more about adopting a kind of mental attitude, rather than something that can easily be understood by trying to clarify a probability.
Then, many people would just unequivocally answer that they assign a greater than 50% probability. Many of those people would go further to say that they’d assign a 100% probability. There’s certain kinds of experiences that have a sort of self evident transcendent seeming quality to them, I’ve had these experiences, so it’s easy for me to understand why some religious people would interpret that as a kind of ontological evidence for their own specific views. I just think they’re making an error.
I have a very religious background but currently I’m not sure whether you would consider me religious. (Also to be clear I watched most of the video but I don’t know much about him otherwise)
I think when hearing people share about personal things in the category of religion, it’s important to try to be careful when pattern matching or when making assumptions about what beliefs people hold. People can use very similar words to refer to vastly different metaphysical beliefs. Two people could also have very similar metaphysical priors, and one might use more religious coded language due to their cultural background, whereas the other might not.
When he says that prayer works, I don’t think you should necessarily take him to mean that he is communicating with an omni*** being who is making changes to our reality based on that communication.
For all intents and purposes he would probably concede to reducing prayer to a form of psychologically theraputic meditation. However, I think part of adopting a religious attitude is a hesitancy towards being reductive in that way.
This is a good question, but how someone responds will vary a lot person to person, and it will be very difficult to converge on a common enough understanding of the meaning of words sufficient to get a clear answer.
For many people, it’s more about adopting a kind of mental attitude, rather than something that can easily be understood by trying to clarify a probability.
Then, many people would just unequivocally answer that they assign a greater than 50% probability. Many of those people would go further to say that they’d assign a 100% probability. There’s certain kinds of experiences that have a sort of self evident transcendent seeming quality to them, I’ve had these experiences, so it’s easy for me to understand why some religious people would interpret that as a kind of ontological evidence for their own specific views. I just think they’re making an error.